🕟 Hi, the current time is about a half past four in the small hours 😴.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Because they’re just boxes. :-D

Why have these Unicode smilies never caught on, I wonder? 🤪

𜲦𜲩 𜲨𜲩 𜲦𜲧
𜲪𜲫 𜲮𜲯 𜲰𜲱

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah, I see. Just crudely checked on my computer, with around 0.013 seconds, Python 2.7 seems a tad faster than Python 3.14’s 0.023 seconds in this little program.

The lazy imports sound not too bad, but I just skimmed over them. There are surprisingly many exceptions, but yeah, no way around them. :-)

mu (µ) now has builtin code formatting and linting tools, making µ far more useful and useable as a general purpose programming language. Mu now includes:

• An interpreter for quick “scriptinog”
  
• A native code compiler for building native executables (Darwin / macOS only for now)
  
• A builtin set of developer tools, currently: fmt (-fmt), check (-check) and test (-test).

As “previsões” de Musk sobre novos desenvolvimentos na Tesla merecem uma extensa página na Wikipédia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autonomous_Tesla_vehicles_by_Elon_Musk

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Mu (µ)’s startup latency appears to be ~10ms on my machine:

$ time ./bin/mu ./foo.mu 

real    0m0.011s
user    0m0.004s
sys     0m0.006s

The baseline here is about 55 ms for nothing, btw. Python ain’t fast to start up.

$ time python -c 'exit(0)'

real    0m0.055s
user    0m0.046s
sys     0m0.007s

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

I assume you made the thing load quickly, didn’t you?

That’s the problem with Python. If you have a couple of files to import, it will take time.

I want this to be reasonably fast on my old Intel NUC from 2016 (Celeron N3050 @ 1.60GHz) and I already notice that the program startup takes about 95 ms (or 125 ms when there are no .pyc files yet). That’s still fine, but it shows that I’ll have to be careful and keep this thing very small …

Python 3.14 will bring lazy imports, maybe that can help in some cases.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de That’s cool! I also like the name of your library. :-) I assume you made the thing load quickly, didn’t you?

@prologic@twtxt.net No, that’s Python/curses on Linux. 😅

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Is this on yout little toy OS? 🤔

Well, you girls and guys are making cool things, and I have some progress to show as well. 😅

https://movq.de/v/c0408a80b1/movwin.mp4

Scrolling widgets appears to work now. This is (mostly) Unicode-aware: Note how emojis like “😅” are double-width “characters” and the widget system knows this. It doesn’t try to place a “😅” in a location where there’s only one cell available.

Same goes for that weird “ä” thingie, which is actually “a” followed by U+0308 (a combining diacritic). Python itself thinks of this as two “characters”, but they only occupy one cell on the screen. (Assuming your terminal supports this …)

This library does the heavy Unicode lifting: https://github.com/jquast/wcwidth (Take a look at its implementation to learn how horrible Unicode and human languages are.)

The program itself looks like this, it’s a proper widget hierarchy:

https://movq.de/v/1d155106e2/s.png

(There is no input handling yet, hence some things are hardwired for the moment.)

I just fixed another bug in tt where the language hint in multiline markdown code blocks had not been stripped before rendering. It just looked like it was part of the actual code, which was ugly. I now throw it away. Actually, it’s already extracted into the data model for possible future syntax highlighting.

Phew, it was just a one-time thing. Ta! :-)

Btw, @shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe, that’s a super cool logo on your yarnd. I like it a lot!

It just doesn’t look aligned properly: https://lyse.isobeef.org/tmp/misalignment.png Could be a yarnd issue, though, it might not expect a logo this large. Just wildguessing, no idea.

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe Because you might not want to commit all changed files in a single commit. I very often make use of this and create several commits. In fact, I like to git add --patch to interactively select which parts of a file go in the next commit. This happens most likely when refactoring during a feature implementation or bug fix. I couldn’t live without that anymore. :-)

If you have a much more organized way of working where this does not come up, you can just git commit --all to include all changed files in the next commit without git adding them first. But new files still have to be git added manually once.

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe Do we now need ad filters in twtxt clients, too? O_o I hope not! Personally, I cannot stand the “Sent with my crappy $phone/$app” e-mail footers.

But congrats on your client. :-)

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe Yeah, they don’t truly support XDG. In fact, I looked in the Go stdlib source code to notice all the differences and shortcomings.

Ok, the standard library implementation is wonky at best, at least in regards to XDG, because it really doesn’t implement it properly. https://github.com/golang/go/issues/62382 I stick to my own code then. It doesn’t properly support anything else than Linux or Unixes that use XDG, but personally, I don’t care about them anyway. And the cross-platform situation is a giant mess. Unsurprisingly.

Hmm, mine also resolves a leading tilde in these variables. And if $HOME is not specified it tries to resolve the user’s home directory by user.Current().HomeDir. Maybe that’s overkill, I have to check the XDG spec.

But I’m definitely missing os.UserDataDir(). That’s a bummer.

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe Cool, I didn’t know about os.UserConfigDir() up until a few seconds ago! I always implemented that myself.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Thanks! I’ll have a look at SnipMate. Currently, I’m (mis)using the abbreviation mechanism to expand a code snippet inplace, e.g.

autocmd FileType go inoreab <buffer> testfunc func Test(t *testing.T) {<CR>}<ESC>k0wwi

or this monstrosity:

autocmd FileType go inoreab <buffer> tabletest for _, tt := range []struct {<CR>    name string<CR><CR><BS>}{<CR>   {<CR>   name: "",<CR><BS>},<CR><BS>} {<CR>  t.Run(tt.name, func(t *testing.T) {<CR><CR>})<CR><BS>}<ESC>9ki<TAB>

But this of course has the disadvantage that I still have to remove the last space or tab to trigger the expansion by hand again. It’s a bit annoying, but better than typing it out by hand.

Oh, suddenly Mother Hulda dumped a centimeter of snow tonight! https://lyse.isobeef.org/schnee-2025-12-30/01.jpg

Magpie from the day before yesterday: https://lyse.isobeef.org/elster-2025-12-28/

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Well, I used SnipMate years ago (until 2012). IIRC, it’s more than just “insert a bit of text here”, it can also jump to the correct next location(s) and stuff like that. Don’t remember why I stopped using it.

Then I used nothing for a long time. Just before Christmas, I made my own plugin (… of course …), which does everything I need at the moment (and nothing more).

It can insert simple templates and then jump to the next location:

https://movq.de/v/67cdf7c827/sisni%2Dpython.mp4

And replace a string after insertion:

https://movq.de/v/67cdf7c827/sisni%2Dheader.mp4

(It’s not public (yet?) and it also uses vim9script, so I guess it wouldn’t work on your system.)

Question to my fellow Vimers: Which snippet insertion mechanism are you using or can you (not) recommend?

** Year in review, 2025 **
Here, an obligatory end of year wrap up kinda post that, as I started to write in what I assume is the classical platonic form for all blogs wherein I reflect thoughtfully on stuff I read, or games I played, or projects I twiddled at, and what not, I became overwhelmed by the act of creating a kinda cursory and meandering review, because, what, in this run on sentence, do I have to contribute that I really wanna commit to you, dear reader?

Instead, let’s try the following.

Right now, in 2025, I’ve go … ⌘ Read more

Pro tip: Don’t keep the christmas biscuits close to the bird fat balls. I nearly mixed up the bags. :-D

@prologic@twtxt.net Debugging this stuff on bare metal hardware (without an underlying OS) is a nightmare. 🤣

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah. I had that in my Python implementation and was really missing that.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I see. Yeah, all the Unicode stuff certainly doesn’t help here, that’s for sure.

Maybe “speedcurses” could be a name. Or just select any Palatinate curse. ;-)

@prologic@twtxt.net Oh yeah, I bet it is horrible to troubleshoot.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org That sounds useful. 🤔

This was the scariest movie I’ve seen in a long time, jesus. 🤣 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_(2022_film)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I’m toying with the idea of making a widget/window system on top of Python’s ncurses. I’ve never really been happy with the existing ones (like urwid, textual, pytermgui, …). I mean, they’re not horrible, it’s mostly the performance that’s bugging me – I don’t want to wait an entire second for a terminal program to start up.

Not sure if I’ll actually see it through, though. Unicode makes this kind of thing extremely hard. 🫤

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Bwahaha. 🤣

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I can tell you this right now, writing assembly / machine code is fucking hard work™ 😓 I’m sure @movq@www.uninformativ.de can affirm 🤣 And when it all goes to shit™ (which it does often), man is debugging fucking hard as hell! Without debug symbols I can’t use the regular tools like lldb or gdb 😂

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, the parser part is what I typically enjoy. Haven’t really looked into code generation itself.

I’m currently looking at your µ commits from the last few days. Holy cow! :-)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yeah I remember you said some days back that your interest in compilers was rekindled by my work on mu (µ) 😅

Dang it, there’s a Swede by the username of Quongsi: https://www.flashback.org/u1404408 :-D

@prologic@twtxt.net Tada, congratulations! I find that rather interesting, thanks for telling us. :-)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de How about “Quongsi”? I generated the first five letters with pwgen --no-capitalize --no-numerals 5 and since that already showed up in DDG search results, I simply appended the last two, which yielded nothing on DDG and Google).

What kind of project is it? Maybe we can help you find a name or nudge you in the right direction.

The tt URLs View now automatically selects the first URL that I probably are going to open. In decreasing order, the URL types are:

1. markdown media URLs (images, videos, etc.)
   
2. markdown or plaintext URLs
   
3. subjects
   
4. mentions
   

I might differentiate between mentions of subscribed and unsubscribed feeds in the future. The odds of opening a new feed over an already existing one are higher.

Whoo! I fixed one of the hardest bugs in mu (µ) I think I’ve had to figure out. Took me several days in fact to figure it out. The basic problem was, println(1, 2) was bring printed as 1 2 in the bytecode VM and 1 nil when natively compiled to machine code on macOS. In the end it turned out the machine code being generated / emitted meant that the list pointers for the rest... of the variadic arguments was being slot into a register that was being clobbered by the mu_retain and mu_release calls and effectively getting freed up on first use by the RC (reference counting) garbage collector 🤦‍♂️

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org True !

@prologic@twtxt.net In my opinion, the integrity isn’t lost. The same input data always result in the same output hash, no matter when you calculate the hashes. It’s true that a corrupt database contents yields to corrupt hashes, but then you have a whole bigger problem than just receiving different hashes. :-D

Trying to come up with a name for a new project and every name is already taken. 🤣 The internet is full!

@zvava@twtxt.net By hashing definition, if you edit your message, it simply becomes a new message. It’s just not the same message anymore. At least from a technical point of view. As a human, personally I disagree, but that’s what I’m stuck with. There’s no reliable way to detect and “correct” for that.

Storing the hash in your database doesn’t prevent you from switching to another hashing implementation later on. As of now, message creation timestamps earlier than some magical point in time use twt hash v1, messages on or after that magical timestamp use twt hash v2. So, a message either has a v1 or a v2 hash, but not both. At least one of them is never meaningful.

Once you “upgrade” your database schema, you can check for stored messages from the future which should have been hashed using v2, but were actually v1-hashed and simply fix them.

If there will ever be another addressing scheme, you could reuse the existing hash column if it supersedes the v1/v2 hashes. Otherwise, a new column might be useful, or perhaps no column at all (looking at location-based addressing or how it was called). The old v1/v2 hashes are still needed for all past conversation trees.

In my opinion, always recalculating the hashes is a big waste of time and energy. But if it serves you well, then go for it.

@zvava@twtxt.net The problem you now then is you lose integrity of the message content if you compute the hashes at runtime rather than on the way in. So if your message content or database becomes corrupt in any way, so do your hashes.

Espanha proíbe concursos de design especulativos sem remuneração: a externalização do risco criativo em troca da promessa de visibilidade, prestígio ou ‘oportunidades futuras’ passa a implicar até 2 anos de prisão

https://graffica.info/pedro-sanchez-prohibe-por-decreto-los-concursos-de-diseno-especulativos-y-blinda-la-cultura-frente-al-trabajo-gratis/

Trying to relax after the last working shift of the year. I’ve got a nice view of #SãoPaulo as the evening falls.

Image

** 📸 Photo **

Image

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe The CSS 404ing highlights the improvability of the content to noise ratio. :-)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de The asshats are everywhere. Luckily, it has been rather quiet so far. But of course, I now jinxed it.

Building native compilers is hard 🤣 Building bytecode VM / interpreters is way easier 🤣

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe Very cool! 😎

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe Nice! 👍

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Thanks! 🙏

O Mattermost, vem-se a saber, não é uma escolha sensata: tem vários componentes proprietários (e é pouco transparente quanto a isso)

https://isitreallyfoss.com/projects/mattermost/

Fico aliviado de na @d3 termos optado pelo Rocket.Chat, que embora não sendo perfeito, cumpre em tudo o que é preciso e (ainda) é software livre.

“Resisting GenAI & Big Tech in Higher Education” by @danmcquillan@danmcquillan
https://danmcquillan.org/resisting_genai_highered_cjuu.html

(via @catarinac@catarinac)

@prologic@twtxt.net This is a really cool project, that’s for sure. 👌

I need to update my profile page now that I finished my PhD… I wonder what should I write…

This animation is made with points in a Python collections.deque data structure, added by dragging the mouse (code shown bellow) 🔭 I'm currently working on a PhD at Unicamp. 🌱 I should be talking less and concentrating, but... 💬 Ask me about drawing with Python! Check out py5 and pyp5js, they bring in the vocabulary from Processing & P5js! I try to make a new drawing with code everyday, and I put the results at skech-a-day. 👯 I’d like to collaborate on open resources to teach programming. I collect tools for teaching Python in a visual output here. If you find the things I share here usefull, consider supporting my work! You can use this PayPal donation link, Wise, liberapay.com/villares, or if you are in Brazil, PIX: 46c37783-5edb-4f1c-b3a8-1309db11488c (chave aleatória). You can check out my Domestika course, Design with Python " target="_blank"> Image

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org … I was about to write “it really is worse where you live”, then I heard the first bang out on the street. 🤣

It’s this time of the year again, where people burn money on the streets.

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-rime-of-the-ancient-maintainer/

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe Nah it’s more like there’s a lot of repeated code, because when you go from source language to intermediate representation to machine code, well you just end up writing a lot of the same patterns over and over again. I need to dedupe this I think.

@kiwu@twtxt.net Ooof 😢 That’s rough!

The compiler technique I’m using here is to not “emit” most of the runtime if it’s actually never used in your program, and also dropping dead code in the SSA pass.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I’ve managed to bring a simple “Hello World!” in mu (µ) (at least on macOS / Darwin / ARM64) down to ~86KB (previously ~146KB) 🥳

Hmmm I need to figure out a way to reduce the no. of lines of code / complexity of the ARM64 native code emitter for mu (µ). It’s insane really, it’s a whopping ~6k SLOC, the next biggest source file is the compiler at only ~800 SLOC 🤔

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I think I can get binaries even smaller with a bit more work and effort 🤔 But yeah still working on the native code generation (at least for macOS targets)

@prologic@twtxt.net Oh! 🤔

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Oh that’s fine, Mu can compile to native code and so far binaries. at least on macOS are in the order of Kb in size 😂

@prologic@twtxt.net That might be a challenge, at least in 16-bit Real Mode: The OS follows the model of COM files on DOS, i.e. the size of the binary cannot exceed 64 KiB and heap+stack of the running program will have to fit into that same 64 KiB. 😅 (The memory layout is very rigid, each process gets such a 64 KiB slice.)

And in 64-bit Long Mode, there is no “kernel” yet. The thing in the video is literally just a small bare-metal program.

But some day, maybe. 😃

@movq@www.uninformativ.de It’d be cool if you could get µ (Mu) running in your little toyOS 🤣 You’d technically only have to swap out the syscall() builtin for whatever your toy OS supports 🤔

Almost all photos turned out to be blurred today. That made sorting a very quick process. Delete, delete, delete, … https://lyse.isobeef.org/waldspaziergang-2025-12-26/

Seeing this run on real hardware is so satisfying, even if it’s just a small example. 😅

https://movq.de/v/ec46b8cf99/netbook.mp4

My little toy operating system from last year runs in 16-bit Real Mode (like DOS). Since I’ve recently figured out how to switch to 64-bit Long Mode right after BIOS boot, I now have a little program that performs this switch on my toy OS. It will load and run any x86-64 program, assuming it’s freestanding, a flat binary, and small enough (< 128 KiB code, only uses the first 2 MiB of memory).

Here I’m running a little C program (compiled using normal GCC, no Watcom trickery):

https://movq.de/v/b27ced6dcb/los86%2D64.mp4

https://movq.de/v/b27ced6dcb/c.png

Next steps could include:

• Use Rust instead of C for that 64-bit program?
  
• Provide interrupt service routines. (At the moment, it just keeps interrupts disabled.)

I’m still deciding if I want to watch #Pluribus. When people told me Carol only wanted to meet the English speaking “imune” people it was such a turn off… like, it sounds rather offensive…

@thecanine@twtxt.net I see 🤔 Very cool though! 😎

@prologic@twtxt.net Not even entirely sure how I did it myself, but likely a lucky combination of the new tail swirl, the legs closer to the screen being bigger and the head looking slightly to the side (eye & ear position), with bottom part of the hair, going behind the snout. The white is just an outline, around most of my works, so I don’t think that plays a part.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de @prologic@twtxt.net Holy shit, this is sooo fucking cool! :-) Wow, I absolutely love it. It’s extremely fascinating what these optimizers do.

Woof, woof, @thecanine@twtxt.net! That’s cute.

Thank you! Merry Christmas! 🎄

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I have not, thanks! <3

@prologic@twtxt.net @movq@www.uninformativ.de Oh, I take my 0°C over the 36°C anytime! Even with yesterday’s gray and windy sleet in my face. However, there are definitely more pleasant times to walk in town, I’ll give you that. For example on 0°C sunny today: https://lyse.isobeef.org/waldspaziergang-2025-12-25/

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I watched a few of these thanks to you! Very cool shit™ 😎

In case you haven’t seen it yet:

Matt Godbolt’s “Advent of Compiler Optimisations”!

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2HVqYf7If8cY4wLk7JUQ2f0JXY_xMQm2

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Ooof that’s chilly 🥶

@prologic@twtxt.net And I froze my ass off yesterday at -5°C and strong winds. 🤣

that’s a whopping 36°C today 🥵

@dce@hashnix.club merry Christmas to you too!

@thecanine@twtxt.net Is it because you’ve used white pixels around it to sort of give it aht 3D look? 👀 Hmm? 🤔

@bender@twtxt.net It’s fun living in the future isn’t it 🤣

@prologic@twtxt.net merry Christmas! I keep forgetting you live in our future. 😅

👋 Merry Xmas 🎄 🎅

This one is a slightly more 3D looking, as well as the first one, with the tail swirled.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Hahaha, this is hilarious! :‘-D

@prologic@twtxt.net 🎄 Merry Christmas and stuff 😅🎅